


Kintsugi

by englishable



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Blind Roy Mustang, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:33:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28902693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: In the aftermath of the Promised Day, Riza attends to the Colonel's hands. The wounds will leave scars, but this has been the pattern of their lives together thus far; she knows how to proceed, more or less.
Relationships: Riza Hawkeye/Roy Mustang
Comments: 11
Kudos: 63





	Kintsugi

**Author's Note:**

> Something minor that I wrote after getting back into this fandom (and this pairing) ten years later. Not entirely sure what I was doing with the symbolism here, but I never really am.

…

The twinned wounds in his hands are positioned at the convergence of their longitudinal and transverse palmar creases, the intersection of the chiromancer’s lines meant to represent one’s fate and one’s strength of will, respectively.

“It’s just as well.” Roy folds the maimed palms across his chest. Fuery has brought him several pages of a raised, dotted alphabet that remind Riza of stubbled wheat poking through the snow. “Fortunetelling’s nothing but a swindle anyway.”

Riza is occupied in rearranging his hospital breakfast tray, setting aside the salt and pepper cellars so that he will not have to reach past his coffee cup for them and flicking seeds from a halved orange with her knife-point. 

“I suppose that finally answers the question of what happened to those ten thousand cens you gambled on the Central City Derby last season, sir?”

Roy gives a manful, aggrieved scoff.

“Don’t insult me like that, Lieutenant,” he says. “I’ve never needed help knowing how to pick a winner.” 

He raises himself up, reaching out in the same motion, and as Riza hands him the breakfast tray’s articles one by one she names them; he turns them in a weakened grip to feel their shapes.

The injuries in his palms have been irrigated, debrided, prescribed a daily antiseptic treatment comprising seven steps – Riza attends to each cleaning herself, the washing and the binding with new cotton gauze – and must now be permitted to heal by secondary intention, his body knitting together the places where the swords pierced deep as sorrow through his flesh and bone. Roy offers his upturned hands each time and waits patient until Riza is finished.

On occasion she glances from her work to study him. They have placed him in the bed nearest the window of this shared room and he sits with the sunlight broad against his back; his extinguished eyes seem to study her in return and there is always a vigilant, seeking composure to his face, like the look of a man deep in prayer.

“We’ll have to work out a new set of signals between the two of us,” he says, once, “now that I can’t—” 

He pauses. He sits with his bare feet swung over the bedside, while Riza has drawn up a stool, so that their knees do not quite touch. Roy tugs his left ear twice using his free hand.

“— Maybe you can do this to me, whenever you want to tell me ‘stop that or I’ll slap you around the head.’” He lets his hand drop to join the other where it rests on Riza’s lap. “What do you think?”

She corks a bottle of silver nitrate. “I should think you’d have learned by now what sort of conduct would get you slapped around the head by me or wouldn’t, sir.”

“In theory? Most certainly. In practice, I’d rather you gave me the warning.”

She turns her eyes down again to unfurl the gauze clockwise around his hand. There is a florid violet-yellow bruise at the crook of her right elbow, where they pushed in the steel syringe with its paraffin tube to perform two consecutive blood transfusions. She can indistinctly recall hearing Roy tell the doctors to take some of his blood, take all that you need, but this was most likely a dream on her part. She knows Roy Mustang’s medical file verbatim and his blood type cannot give to hers, although the file contains a careful note in pen indicating that her type can give to his. 

“Henceforth I’d prefer to just tell you what I’m thinking,” she says. “If you don’t mind.”

Roy smiles.

“No,” he says. “I could get used to that.”

This expression layers itself over others behind Riza’s memory: Roy as a young man stepping mutely away from the scorched skin of her naked back, Roy as a soldier with pale dust on his feet, Roy as the city-bred boy who for the whole first week of their acquaintanceship would address her as miss or ma’am or yes-thank-you-please whenever he met her in the dark stairwells or the estate’s dying garden, in the half-collapsed barn where Riza would be gore-spattered to her wrists from skinning rabbits for the stewpot. 

And she remembers how he had screamed when they slashed her throat, when the blades nailed his hands to the stone and when the circle of sacrifice closed around him, so that his voice had been soft and hoarse as he asked her if she could still fight.

A ticklishness springs up behind her eyes. Something warm slips along her nose to splash Roy’s marked palm; Riza moves to fetch her hands away and he clutches at them with a lurching, abrupt intuition as though attempting to keep himself upright. He does not let go. 

They stay this way, together, until at last Roy feels his frail, painstaking way along her arm and bandaged neck and through her loosened locks of hair to dry her face with unsteady fingers. 

“There’s no need for that, Lieutenant,” he says. “You’re the one who’s said how useless I am when it’s raining.”

Riza reaches up, finishes fastening the gauze around his palm with an aluminum clip, and because he cannot see what is in her eyes she instead keeps her hand laid carefully over the shape of his.

“Yes, sir,” she says. “I’m sure it’ll pass soon enough.”

… 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * A [Restricted Work] by [klainelynch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/klainelynch/pseuds/klainelynch) Log in to view. 




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